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Acclaimed French band Air will play a Moon Safari tour with stop in Austin

Air's set in Vienna was appropriately spacey.

Chérie Hansson

Legendary French duo Air will go on an extensive North American tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album Moon Safari, which includes a stop at Austin's Moody Amphitheatre on October 30.

They'll also stop at Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas on October 29.

Tickets will be available for presale on March 7 at 10 am via LiveNation. General tickets are on sale on March 8 at 10 am.

Similar to their recent European tour, which sold out in record time, Air will be playing their widely celebrated album in its entirety for the first time ever. The band released the demo version of "New Star In The Sky" ahead of the digital release of the 25th anniversary deluxe album on March 15, featuring over 10 cherry-picked Moon Safari audio rarities.

Since Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel formed the band in 1995, the prolific duo has released six albums in addition to their acclaimed EP Premiers Symptômes, which was followed by the release of the aforementioned classic Moon Safari along with two soundtracks that all together sold millions of copies.

Air garnered an extensive list of worldwide accolades for their unique brand of downtempo electronic music that not only sculpted the sound for the next generation of electronic-influenced pop music, but also was able to withstand the test of time in its own right.

On January 16th 1998, Air released Moon Safari, an album which catapulted Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel to the uppermost rung of electronic music's ladder. Their sound — Fender Rhodes trills, loping basslines, and sensual-yet-playful vocal hooks, all woven into a texture as fine and luxe as chiffon — conjured the sensation of a space-age cocktail designed to be sipped at a leisurely pace. It's not challenging to see how this curious little record became a global sensation.

While Air's precise alchemy and absence of geographical anchoring placed Moon Safari outside the grip of temporality or trend, the album happened to be an orbiting satellite which intersected with the world below's revolutions at precisely the right moment.

Through Moon Safari, Air transfixed some of the great visionaries of the late 20th century — David Bowie, Madonna, Beck — as well as influencing preeminent aesthetes of the incoming age, including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kevin Parker, and Sofia Coppola, whose creative relationship with Air became as synergetic as that of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch (another fan, while we're here.) Air helped fan the flames of a rare Francophilia which surging through the typically nativist British charts in 1998.

Moon Safari birthed three hit singles in "Kelly Watch The Stars," "All I Need," and "Sexy Boy," shifted over half a million copies in the UK, and pushed Air into headline contention at banner festivals such as Glastonbury. This in turn brought American, European and even hesitant French audiences and critics in line, a ripple effect which continued into the mid-2000s, with a string of successive top 10 albums for Air, at home and abroad.

North American tour dates are as follows:
*Not a Live Nation Date

9/25 - Vancouver, BC @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre
9/27 - Seattle, WA @ Benaroya Hall
9/29 - Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum
9/30 - Los Angeles, CA @ Orpheum
10/2 - San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic
10/4 - Denver, CO @ Bellco Theater
10/6 - Minneapolis, MN @ State Theatre
10/8 - Chicago, IL @ Auditorium Theatre
10/10 - Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre
10/12 - Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall
10/13 - Montreal, QC @ Place Bell
10/15 - Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
10/17 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Met
10/18 Washington DC @ The Anthem*
10/21 - New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
10/24 - Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle
10/26 - Miami Beach, FL @ Fillmore Miami Beach
10/29 - Dallas, TX @ Music Hall at Fair Park
10/30 - Austin, TX @ Moody Amphitheatre

music concerts

Movie Review

Saoirse Ronan goes back to WWII for dramatic period film Blitz

Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in Blitz.

The horrors of World War II are 80+ years in the past, yet they remain a fascination for many filmmakers. The latest film to tackle the era, Blitz, is centered around the German Blitzkrieg air raids on London in September 1940, but uses a more personal story to illustrate its impact.

Rita (Saoirse Ronan) lives with her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) and her father Gerald (Paul Weller) in the lower class neighborhood of Stepney, but no one in the city is immune from the bombs being dropped by the Germans. The government has opened up some of the Underground (aka subway) tunnels for residents to use as bomb shelters, but the haphazard nature of their availability leads Rita to send George to safety in the countryside to protect him.

George, who is biracial, experiences racist abuse on the train, and instead of remaining with the other children to their destination, he jumps off and tries to make his way back to London. Meanwhile, Rita is doing her best to keep her mind off of George’s absence, working at a munition factory and volunteering at a bomb shelter, not knowing that George has put himself back in danger.

Written and directed by Steve McQueen, the film should be one that elicits emotions relatively easily, with ordinary people dealing with the effects of war and a mother separated from her only child. And while all the elements are present, there’s that certain something missing that leaves the story somewhat uninvolving. McQueen makes you want to see George make it back safely and for Rita to be reunited with him, but there is a degree of sentimentality that’s missing from the film as a whole.

Instead of going down that road, McQueen puts a big focus on the racism and bigotry experienced by various people in the film. Flashbacks give a sense of what George and his dad, Marcus (CJ Beckford), went through prior to the war, and Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a warden who tries to help George find his way home, encounters it multiple times while just doing his duty. While McQueen’s point — that people of color still had to endure acts of hatred in a time when people should have been coming together — is valuable, his methods of showing it are often heavy-handed.

Still, the film is well-made and remains visually engaging throughout. The combination of practical sets and CGI put the viewer right in the middle of the bombed-out London, and there are few missteps with how the city is presented. And even though the main mother-son story is only lightly effective, the trials and tribulations that each go through individually are interesting and occasionally suspenseful.

Ronan is a fantastic actor who might get nominated for an Oscar yet again for her other recent film, The Outrun, but this role pales in comparison. Whether it’s because the 30-year-old is a bit young to be fully believable in a mother role or because of the storytelling missteps, she’s merely good instead of great here. Heffernan does a solid job in his film debut, reacting ably to McQueen putting him through his paces.

Blitz joins the seemingly never-ending well of stories from World War II, and while it doesn’t succeed as mightily as other notable war films, it never becomes anything less than watchable. The family story at its center could have been more heartfelt, but McQueen is still a great filmmaker with a flair for visual composition.

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Blitz is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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